Recent reviews by Arsonistic

A bad game in a great world.

Mechanically very flawed. The game is a mix of a fighting game and a strategy game, and neither part of the game is any good. The fighting system is pretty anemic; animations are boring and flow poorly. The strategy systems are very unintuitive and feel anything but strategic; it takes a lot of effort/input to execute commands, and they're terribly imprecise.
The only mechanically good part is the driving system. Most vehicles feel pretty good to use.
The pop-in is pretty bad, but nothing that interferes too much with driving.

The main story is nothing special, but the lore/backstory is great. The lore can be found at chained up statues you can activate by "ground-slamming". Speaking of which, NOWHERE during the process of the game do they tell you how to activate these statues, nor do they explain how to free the Dragon statues anywhere outside of the codex. These 2 combined account for most of the collectibles in the game, making it crazy not to have a proper explanation for them.

But despite all that negativity/mediocrity, I think the game is worth playing because of the world, theme and aesthetics. The visuals may be quite dated in technical terms (polygon count, texture resolution, animation precision and the like), but the aesthetics are beautiful despite the limitations. The game is absolutely full of clever, inventive designs like microphone birds with TRS cable nests, cymbal bushes, exhaust pipe trees and many more.
The best part of the game is easily just driving around the world looking at all the amazing designs, with the radio blasting metal.

A fun, charming adventure with a rushed ending.

This is a pretty classic Point & Click game, a return to form if you will.
The game still has slight 'rub-everything-on-everything' issues, but the hint system and fading out items you've already tried do serve to mitigate that classic issue.
The story sets up a pretty decent mystery, but the ending is a slight bit of a flop. And not just story-wise, it seemed really rushed mechanically as well, having a progress-stopping bug, requiring a save reload, and having a seemingly pointless duplicate item.
The game looks pretty good visually. There are some oddities, visual glitches and unpolished backgrounds, but for the most part it's a pretty game that'll run just fine on integrated graphics.
Voice acting is pretty good overall. And it contains a lot of charming humor.

If you're not into Point & Click, I'm not sure this game does enough to change that, but if you're a fan, or new to the genre I'd say this is well worth a try.

Fun concept, but annoying execution.
For a tactically focused game there's just too much left to chance; AI movement is unreliable and random and artillery shot aim is a loose suggestion. As those 2 elements are very core to the whole game a lot of it just becomes restarting missions in the hopes of getting lucky with the RNG.

As for the flavor, some can be mildly amusing, but most of it just feels like a waste of time; a lot of the vignettes are pointless and devoid of anything interesting/fun. The humor seems to be mostly "random humor", where you're expected to think it's funny because something random and unexpected happens. It's a style of humor that can work, but when all of the humor is of the same type with no other substance it gets really predictable and boring.

Resolution is pretty wonky if you use a Windows UI scaling other than 1x; you can't run at native resolution; your highest resolution is native divided by your scaling multiplier (1440p/1.25x = 1152p in my case). Trying to set your native resolution can move parts of the game off the actual screen.
But that's about it in terms of technical issues; the game is pretty barebones, there's not a lot that can break and no display options outside of the bare minimum of resolution, V-Sync, e.t.c..

Game has a 60FPS-lock, no borderless window mode and no Anti-Aliasing. I injected SMAA using Reshade to solve the lack of AA(the game seems to be using OpenGL). Forcing MSAA through Nvidia/AMD drivers might work too.

A very mixed bag of good and bad, but this game ultimately falls on 2 big things:
- Grind: You get credits for every mission you complete, and the missions can be re-played for another set of credits. You often need parts/upgrades you don't have access to when first unlocking a mission just to 5-star(max) a mission. I dunno about you, but I don't play singleplayer Tower Defense/RTS games to grind...
- "♥♥♥♥-up cascade": The game is very much structured around the principle of tiny mistakes leading to bigger ones, in a cascading fashion. Losing a part of your ship makes the rest of the mission harder to complete, not to mention that you probably will lose mission completion bonuses on top of that, further punishing small mistakes. This results in a gameplay that encourages restarting missions over and over, until everything works flawlessly.
These 2 negatives compound and makes the game feel like it's really wasting my time.

A very flawed gem of a game.
The game is full of small bugs, but luckily nothing gamebreaking.
General character controls are janky and awful, especially for the Bow; This is annoying during action sequences, where you need to take multiple actions quickly.
Raft controls are also pretty wonky.
There's a lot of repetition; only 4 tilesets and 4 types of enemies, which is pretty bad for a Roguelike/lite, makes gameplay very repetitive. Not as big of an issue if you only play through the campaign though, in fact, that's why I'd recommend the campaign as the best way to play the game.
Despite all those issues I had a nice experience with the game. The setting, audio and visuals just ooze style and I found the game quite soothing to play. The game has an entire album of unique country music custom made for the game. This music really struck a cord with me when it came on the first time I set off on the raft; it fits the setting and atmosphere so perfectly and really enhanced the experience. And I'm not even a fan of such music normally.

If you're willing to put up with some level of jank and bugs I recommend giving this a shot, because it's a pretty unique experience.

Game takes 1-2hours to finish.
It has some good encounters and fun puzzles.
The game has an annoying glare effect that can't be turned off, and something isn't well optimized; one room in particular drops FPS down to ~70, and I normally get hundreds of FPS in Source Engine games.
Still a fun experience overall. Give it a shot.

BUY THE REDUX VERSION INSTEAD OF THIS.
You get this version for free when buying the REDUX version.

This is a good game, but the REDUX version improves a number of aspects, making this version mostly obsolete.

Link to review of the REDUX version.

I hesitantly recommend the game. It's a good game, but one with notable flaws.

This REDUX version of the game also includes the original, so there's no reason to even consider buying that version on its own.
The REDUX version makes a few graphical and gameplay adjustments, mostly for the better, but not exclusively so. That being said, the ability to dash on its own is a massive improvement to the game. It makes exploration much less of a boring and makes fights more interactive. It does make the game a lot easier though, so I recommend playing the game on Hard to compensate.
The dash also has a downside in that dashing down slopes/stairs can sometimes kill you from the momentum, but it's not a common occurrence and is easily avoided. REDUX also adds QuickSave functionality, making such issues even less of a hassle.
REDUX adds a melee weapon, but I think that detracts more than it adds to the game simply because it's not great(the game clearly wasn't made with melee combat in mind) and it gets in the way of cycling between the ranged weapons (there are 2 ranged weapons with 5 firing modes each).
The main graphical addition in REDUX is super-sampling; you can render the game at up to 200% resolution. It's a nice feature with the lack of Anti-Aliasing that the game has.
The game had some issues with V-Sync and Adaptive Sync (Freesync/G-Sync). For whatever reason I just couldn't get the game to stop tearing; no ingame option nor driver setting worked. This is the only game that has ever happened for me. Odd issue, but one I could live with.

Graphically, the game holds up surprisingly well. Polygon counts are noticeably low, but textures look decent and the lighting effects are pretty darn good; it uses some clever techniques to emulate more advanced lighting tech and it works darn well for the most part.
It also helps that the game has a great aesthetic, even if the technical aspects of the visuals can be noticeably dated at times.
The game does have blood/dirt effects when taking damage that are pretty annoying. They're far too intense for times when you barely take any damage at all. I do believe REDUX has slightly toned down effects compared to the original though, which I remember being awful in that regard.
Note: There's a sharpening filter on by default. It can be turned off by changing the Post Processing setting to Low.

The 10 guns(yes 10, not 2; the different firing nodes are different enough to be wholly different weapons) are nice to use and pretty well-balanced, only the basic machine gun feels notably weak relative to the others.
Enemies can be a bit bullet-sponge:y at times, but nothing too bad.
The environment has lots of destructible objects that can damage enemies, sometimes setting off some pretty fun chain reactions, like a series of 5 cars blowing up in a parking garage.

But there's one part of the game I have nothing good to say about: the storyline and characters. They can be summed up as very stupid with a side of stupid. But story is luckily mostly relegated to the loading screens, making it easy to ignore.

All-in-all, a flawed, but fun game. Worth a play.

Beautiful visuals, amazing story, tight gameplay and a banging soundtrack combine to make what I would argue is the best game of the year.

Like with other Supergiant games story and music are tied incredibly well to the gameplay, flowing seamlessly with it.

There are a few bugbears though, like parts of character side-stories referencing parts of the main story that aren't accurate at that moment, but most importantly: BALANCE.
Balance, while not necessarily bad, isn't good either. About half the available "loot" is some degree of good, while the other half is some degree of bad. This generally led to me using certain gods(Athena, Aphrodite) a lot and certain other gods(Artemis, Ares, Dionysus) a lot less, severely hindering variation (cuz I obviously wanna win..).
And of the 6 total weapons: Shield and Spear stand out as strong, while the Bow is quite weak. But there's a currency-boosting(for buying upgrades/visual changes) mechanic that selects one weapon per run to give +20%, giving you incentive to vary up weapon choices, making lack of variation less of an issue there.

Extremely technically dated; game runs at 800x600 resolution and has very obvious image compression artifacts.
But good game design never gets old.
An absolute gem of a TD(Tower Defense) game. It solves a lot of the issues TD games normally have with for example:
Lack of interaction during waves, by making resource generation/collection timed and manual.
Wonky range and placement interactions, by making everything neatly row- and column-based.

This is an absolute classic well worth your time if you've yet to experience it.